Excerpted from my book of photographs:
Wabi-Sabi – Decay, Emptiness,
and Other Ephemeral Beauty.
If I told you I was taking you to the middle of nowhere, and then dropped you in my hometown of Manchester, Ohio, you’d likely look around and say, “Yup, this looks like it.”
Fifty years after Cox’s tavern burnt down and was replaced by an ugly, square, orange brick building half its size, the remaining half of the lot is still empty – one of two empty lots that have stood on the corners of the town’s main intersection for decades.
Cox’s was a two-story wood building with an apartment upstairs over the restaurant and bar, and a covered, wood plank walkway along its front that looked like it was left over from the days where, if the cowboy movies have it right, people in western towns walked up from the muddy streets filled with horses and buckboards, to get to the sidewalk.
In the 1950’s, when Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy ruled the television airwaves – and the lunch boxes – you could hear the heels of your cowboy boots and the jingle of your spurs echo into the wooden rafters as you and your buddy lumbered along that walkway like you were six feet tall – sharing one pair of spurs between you, ’cause that’s all you had – and that was enough. We certainly sounded six feet tall.
Inside Cox’s, bear right to the restaurant or bear left to the bar, past the cigarette- and pinball machines glowing in the cool, sudden darkness of the interior, Johnnie Ray’s “Walking in the Rain” on the jukebox; sawdust on the rough-hewn wood plank floor, smooth from use even then. Go on Sunday with your dad and get your weekly allotment of sugar in an ice-cream cone, a nickel a scoop.
Down the street was White’s General Store. The owner was also the scoutmaster for the local Boy Scout troop. Don Cope, who owned the pharmacy across the street from White’s, was our next-door neighbor. The school bus driver lived a few houses down from us – as did Mrs. Meyers, the third grade teacher. Chuck, the cool high school senior who always had a wintergreen lifesaver for me when I was lucky enough to grab a seat next to him on the bus after school, was also my piano teacher. It was like the movie, Wizard of Oz – the same people would show up over and over in your life, but they’d be someone else! One might have got the impression that, with so few people in the town, everyone had to do double duty.
The requisite soda shop – the Bow Wow (who knows why) – was, conveniently, just across the street from the high school, so teenagers didn’t have far to go after classes let out in the afternoons. Big glass candy counter taller than you were, inside the door on your right, school supplies hanging on the wall behind; pretzel sticks and red licorice whips in heavy glass jars on top of the counter.
Six old, round, chrome and vinyl stools were anchored in front of the Formica counter where you could get a burger, fries, and a real milkshake made to order and served in a tall metal flask – enough even to share with a friend, if necessary – or, if you were lucky, with a special someone.
A counter for takeout at the back, four wooden booths along the opposite side, a pinball machine, and a Seeburg jukebox, circa 1954, completed the picture. The owners of the Bow Wow lived nearby – across the street from us, on Stump Road – just a short walk from the Bow Wow.
…
Every year or two I’ve found myself returning to my hometown, in a search for an unobtainable past – looking, perhaps, for the life I would have had if events hadn’t necessitated my family’s abrupt abandonment of this bit of heaven when I was twelve – a town where, if you didn’t know everyone, it surely felt like it; a home where, true or not, I felt safe and unconditionally loved – not an unknown state of affairs for some lucky children in the world – and for awhile I was one of them.
This was a town where you could leave your car keys in the ignition without a thought, and you didn’t need them to get into your house ’cause the door was unlocked anyway. Where spring mornings were so beautiful they could cause me – a “goody two-shoes” at age eleven – to decide to walk the considerable distance to school rather than take the bus, even though I knew it would make me late;
Where a chance encounter with our landscaper’s son turned into a 50-year friendship; where we watched Twilight Zone on Friday nights, then slept out on the screened porch – me lying awake half the night with the Twilight Zone episode reverberating in my mind – too afraid to sleep; watching the yellow lightning bugs, listening to the crickets in the humid night, and staring at the light of the now-known-to-be-carcinogenic radium dial of my watch;
A town where your friend’s sister might introduce you to her friend, who’d take a shine to you, and soon be teaching you the cha-cha in her basement. She lived across town, coincidentally, close enough to my house for me to walk to hers and catch the school bus with her on one of those spring mornings, where we’d secretly hold hands till we got to school. After school sometimes, we’d meet in the forest between our houses, and play a game that involved me swinging on a vine out over the stream that ran through the wooded ravine, and her kissing me each time I successfully returned – which, I might add, was every time – thank you, Johnny Weissmuller. I was eleven and she was twelve. (And when did you last swing on a vine?)
In the book, Homing Instinct – Meaning & Mystery in Animal Migration, Bernd Heinrich opines that the homing instinct is not limited to birds, bees, butterflies, and salmon, but is also a factor for humans. He says, “Security for (him) was a memory of where (he) had come from…For other animals and for us,” Heinrich says, “home is a ‘nest’ where we live, where our young are reared. It is also the surrounding territory that supports us. ‘Homing’ is migrating to and identifying a suitable area for living and reproducing and making it fit our needs, and the orienting and ability to return to our own good place if we are displaced from it.”
My parents’ divorce prompted a move of half my family to Los Angeles – land of asphalt schoolyards, glaring sun, and six million strangers. The planet Mars would have been as familiar to me – and equally life sustaining. Though the move, in the end, provided me with a life that would have been unavailable to me in the small town in which I was raised, it was an abrupt dislocation from which, in some ways, I’ve never really recovered; and in a strange, clearly doomed-to-fail effort to somehow pick up the pieces of the life I loved, but never got a chance to live out, like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, I’m compelled to return to a town that, while barely changed in over half a century, at the same time, no longer exists.
For me, this forms the heart of the Wabi-Sabi sensibility – the desolate beauty of a rural small town, its surrounding forests and its fields, the decaying buildings no longer inhabited by those I once knew, and the longing for the unobtainable past – a time whose resonance is still palpable in the warm spring mornings and gray winter skies of my hometown.
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